How Canada played a key role in neoliberalizing Ukraine

 

The ‘Ukraine Reform Conference’ is as an annual event that engages political leaders from NATO countries, the G7, the European Union and private think tanks in key reforms aimed at reforming Ukraine’s economy. 

‘Reform’ is a favorite buzzword among liberals in post-2014 Ukraine, following the western sponsored Maidan coup. It implies a set of initiatives advocated by loyal foreign allies designed to lift Ukraine out of its poverty. In reality, it’s a politically neutered way to describe neo-colonial economic liberalization, the topic of the previous two articles. 

One detrimental reform seen in post-maidan Ukraine was the elimination of food price regulation in 2017. Along with the destruction of Ukraine’s domestic food production as a result of trade liberalization, this lead to food scarcity and hunger even exceeding levels of many Latin American countries. 

All the usual suspects were present at the 2019 Ukraine Reform Conference – Chrystia Freeland, Justin Trudeau, and delegates from other NATO countries and Ukraine. The key issue on the agenda was “the irreversibility of reforms in Ukraine”. Apart from the undesirability of said reforms, ‘irreversibility’ hardly seems like a democratic way for a group of foreign countries to advocate for implementing economic reforms in a given country. For the Ukraine Reform Conference however, it’s a go!

In fact, the ‘irreversibility’ of these reforms directly rules out the pursuit of democracy. 2021 saw the legally dubious sanctioning of leaders of political parties such as the Opposition Platform for Life (OPFL), by presidential decree. This party, which primarily represented the industrial workers of Ukraine’s south-east, advocating a pro-peace and anti-IMF platform, consistently ranked high among voters. At the start of 2021, it often came a close second in polls after Zelensky’s “Servant of the People”. Following Zelensky’s 2021 unilateral bans and sanctions against the OPFL’s media voice and leading politicians, the party lost a third of its voters. Bypassing due process within the court system, associated media groups which described the negative effects of IMF-sponsored economic liberalization were also closed in 2021 by order of Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council. This included ZiK, Strana, 112, NewsOne and Ukrlive among others, with Zelensky even sanctioning the Editor in-Chief of the social democratic opposition media source Strana. The reasoning for such crude censorship was vague and criticized by the European Federation of Journalists.  (more...)

How Canada played a key role in neoliberalizing Ukraine